This is subjective, but I’ve found the very best wines don’t require context (assuming we’re talking about a group of people into wine / curious about it, people who understand the basics of wine appreciation, who for example have tasted wines with smooth, ripe tannins and wines with aggressive, unripe tannins to know the range of possibilities in texture of a wine, etc). I think you can immediately tell a truly epic wine in the glass, usually even when young. I often like to present the best wine I am serving blind to sort of test the true reaction to it. A few recent examples I served blind - 2001 Giacosa Rabaja, 2010 Monfortino, 2015 Roagna Crichet Paje - all immediately gratifying wines that towered above everything else on the table without any context as to what they were, or how especially the latter two were a mistake to open because on paper they are far too young to drink.
I’d try at least a few others. At the high end there is dal Forno which is very very different in style at the same price level and for less money Roccolo Grassi. In the same style as Quintarelli but at a fraction of the price there is L’Arco.
It might be the unique style of Quintarelli or simply Veronese reds. I’m love wines from this region and actually started my journey with a Quintarelli.
Thank you for mentioning this wine. Economou was one of my first non-Napa cabs I drank, and one of my favorites from that era. I liked the Economou wines so much that I steered an entire family trip to visit the winery in Crete (which is a great island for a family trip, as so it happens!). I still fondly recall eating some grapes outside their ancestral home (and location of the winery if I’m not mistaken). And Economou saying he had a few higher end cuvees in tank hidden in reserve, waiting for the time to release them, at hopefully a higher price point to make the winery more economic. This must have been 6+ years ago, and I finished all my Economou since (I think 2004 Sitia was my favorite then) and now I saw your post and I see he’s released a couple more wines! Including this Antigone from 2004… for $150! So I guess he did it.
I was thinking of Valentini when I first noticed this thread. I agree with what you and @William_Kelley are saying about context being helpful and important when understanding a wine. For most regions, it’s really fun geeky stuff to have some context. But one can move through an awful lot of wine from Abruzzo and that still isn’t going to give any real context for something like Valentini other than that it shatters the mold. Other than Pepe and some others that are elevating quality there today, wines like this are pretty singular.
Can I not understand basketball because I never saw Bill Russell play basketball?
If you have never seen a Picasso, you cannot understand art?
By and large the greatest wine of a region is still only marginally greater than the next 10 (or 100) examples of the region. To suggest that the absence of tasting any wine(even Rayas) precludes a full understanding of any region, and most especially Burgundy, is heading the wrong direction (IMO). The diversity of Pinot Noir and range of expressions in Burgundy from Mercurey to Santenay to Chambolle to Musigny to Pernand-Vergelesses to Vosne Romanee is essential to understanding Pinot Noir. Far more so than sampling the “best” Pinot Noir the region produces.
I think drinking the benchmarks are helpful in understanding an appellation, but certainly not essential. I think drinking broadly across a region is necessary in understanding it but not having drank a singular top wine doesn’t mean much.
I can only speak for myself. Having spent the past 20+ years drinking and caring about burgundy, and visiting the region 4 times, I’ve barely scratched the surface. For me, I don’t feel that I yet understand burgundy. Maybe one day?
And that’s just burgundy.
I suppose first defining the expectation of context and understanding is helpful, but in re-reading this thread I can’t come up with a better approach than William did in his first reply here.
I certainly agree that it’s rude to claim someone’s opinion doesn’t matter if they haven’t tasted DRC or some other seemingly arbitrary wine.
I’d agree completely. (And wasn’t really intending to make it a direct reply to you but rather a general commentary on the idea that one needs to taste any specific wine for context)
I was lucky enough to develop a reasonable working idea of Burgundy to the level that my awareness helped me to enjoy bottles more, but I was a far cry from understanding it.
Burgundy just be like that tho
I think that’s far too general. Some benchmarks are outliers (Rayas, Vatan to name two). Some are archetypal, but clearly at the top of their class (DRC, Yquem, Dauvissat, for example).
So how many did you buy? 
Hah, because I have such “amazing restraint”, only 4 bottles. Two bottles each of the 2014 and 2015 Hudelot Noellat Chambolle Musigny Village for under USD40.
I think if you are looking at a bunch of impressionist paintings, the context is helpful to identify what is great from the merely OK. If you stand in front of a Monet rendition of Water Lillies, you can appreciate how it stands apart from other efforts in the same genre. This does not mean you cannot enjoy other paintings by less regarded impressionist painters, but most observers who have seen enough of the impressionist masters can discriminate that these masterworks go above the ordinary. After all, visual appreciation is not much different from a taste sensation. It is ephemeral. But knowing a lot about the creation and comparative efforts of similar artists does deepen the experience, at least for me. Appreciation of wine is not all that different, yes?
100%.
I enjoy Chandon des Briailles Ille de Vergelesses very, very much as well as the Ecard Savigny-Les-Beaune wines. My wine journey is far better for having had those wines, more so than many “greater” wines.
And with context, I can appreciate Monet as a master without necessarily having to have his work be a personal favorite. I do absokutely enjoy many of his paintings but would fill my “cellar” with other producers if I had the wherewithal to buy his paintings. I feel this way about Richebourg as a GC as well.
How important is it to understand typicity of a specific wine in order to appreciate it?
Not at all.
Typicity is your preconceived notion of what something is supposed to be. So you taste a Blaufrankisch from Burgenland and you believe that it should all taste like that. But that’s not even where the grape came from. However, since you don’t know that, you say that is typicity and a wine that does not taste like that is rejected. Even if it grows in Michigan or England.
So, to keep your ego intact, you state that it is not what the “standard” is, and you reject any wine that is not part of that bias. And you can’t stand a Nebbiolo grown in CA because it’s not like the wine in Piedmont.
But if you like the wine at the moment you’re drinking it, that’s your context. Not how it resembles a wine from somewhere else, or not whether it’s the “correct” glass or not, just whether you enjoy it at the moment you’re drinking it.
Understanding the typicity of a wine can enhance appreciation, but it’s not essential for enjoyment. Being a wine lover is enough to appreciate its nuances. While context adds depth, ultimately, the joy of wine lies in personal experience and enjoyment. Cheers! 
My first Burgundy was a 1978 DRC RC. Every other red Burgundy was a letdown for a really long time. Full context is incredibly hard to discover but partial context can hold you back as much as it can lead you forward.
I think this is such an interesting topic. I think it’s important for me to say, that I don’t think there is any wrong way to enjoy or appreciate wine, nor is there a correct and proper way.
For me, I started my appreciation of wine purely from a sense of humility and knowing very little. I didn’t even really know what I liked. So for a very long time (and to some extent still to this day) I open a wine with the understanding that I want to understand it, before I worry about whether I like it or not. I didn’t immediately open big huge oaky chardonnay’s and assume that they were crap, just the same that I didn’t open steely, minerally Chablis and assume that they were thin and weedy. I tried for a long time to give each wine its own space and to understand who made this wine and for whom was it intended? Context becomes EVERYTHING for this endeavor.
Now, I will be the first to admit that I still haven’t tasted and deeply or widely as most on this board and I probably never will. But I am really now starting to move away from an “educational and searching” mentality about wine and moving towards acquiring and enjoying bottles that make me happy. I know many people (I have close friends and family members in mind) who approached wine very differently from me. They drink Napa Cab. They had it once and loved it. It “fit” their definition of what red wine should be. They will begrudgingly try bottles that I introduce them to. Some like Southern Rhone’s, they enjoy. Others like Cote Rotie are a hard no. It doesn’t fit their vision of their “platonic” wine. Never mind Rieslings or grower champagne.
This isn’t to say either approach is wrong. My sense was to approach all of the wine world with humility. I think if you do that, you open your mind to appreciate a wine intellectually and even emotionally w/o needing it to be 100% sensory pleasure. If anything, I’m learning to trust my own senses more now that I’ve gained some experience.
This, and moreso. The grasping the diversity of Burgundy can help one get a healthy context for wine in general. Great PN from CA, OR, NZ and elsewhere shouldn’t be expected to taste “like Burgundy”. But, the guidance of Burgundy probably led the winemaker to allow it to reflect its site well.
What’s exciting to me in Italy isn’t what’s going on in the fuddy-duddy regions (not that there isn’t a surge of quality there, too), but the folks bringing back near extinct grapes and making thrilling wines out of them. Many of these grapes are so unlike anything else. Taking a modern understanding and highlighting what they’re about, making perhaps better wines than ever out of them, where maybe traditional winemaking resulted in lost aromatics, oxidative character and so forth. Recognizing the potential of a grape at a site, whether traditional or new, then realizing it is something special. Context is then a broader, more abstract thing when there is no direct benchmark or typicity.
Ha! My observation is people dismissing CA Nebbiolo for not tasting like Barolo.
It was amusing at a double-blind California Nebbiolo tasting a couple years ago with some of these same wines in the mix. We’d had had many bottles of Barolo among the non-blind walk around and socialize wines that were open. So, it was expected there’d be ringers. (We used provided bags, opened our contributions in private and brought the bagged wines to a table. Someone else later shuffled and numbered the bags.) Wine after wine somms were identifying which sub-region of Piemonte a wine was from, making educated guesses at the producer and vintage. Then, wine after wine was revealed and from California. Somewhere half-way among the 16 wines was a lone ringer.